Mystery Signatures Raise Questions About Oversight

Full of juicy details, it describes how a former DC principal started and grew a professional development program that, for all its potential effectiveness, seems to have lacked any real oversight or structure.

The district gave out big money without a contract, the approved program didn't mesh with other district efforts, the program founders fought internally and one ended up dropping a dime on the founder, and -- my favorite part -- current and former district officials are denying that approval signatures found on various documents are actually theirs.

TrackBack URL for this entry:http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00e54f8c25c9883400e54fbffc278834

Permalink URL for this entry:http://scholasticadministrator.typepad.com/thisweekineducation/2007/12/mystery-signatu.html

You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

I received professional development from TI (the organization in question), and I have to say I'm really sorry to hear all this. I'm sorry because it was by far and away the best professional development I ever got from anything associated with DCPS, and was far better than anything I ever even heard of. Teachers I knew in non-TI schools were so jealous when I told them of what we got, and several asked me for curricular materials. I knew there were problems when the people involved quit (all of whom were spectacular), but I didn't know they were this bad. I really hope they don't end up shutting TI down for this - fixing the problems that poor oversight allowed to happen would be far more preferable than scrapping a program loved by teachers and principals.

i guess i should add that the two women still running the group always seemed to do a great job in providing high-quality services and classroom materials for us. My students' achievement would have definitely been lower had I used the standard DCPS curriculum rather than the Balanced Literacy method taught by TI.